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CPSG represents a synthesis of several trends that have been emerging in our psychoanalytic discourse over the past decades. With British object relations theories and then the self psychologies, there has been a shift to infancy as the period of psychic structure formation, equal to—perhaps even more critical than—the oedipal period. As a result, theorists have turned to infant developmental studies, seeking knowledge of the competencies of this early period. The influence of the observational methodology (including videotaping) of those studies on the gathering and interpretation of data has focused attention on observable phenomena emerging in a real-time present (the “here and now”) that is even closer to the surface than the “experience-near” emphasis of self psychology (Kohut 1984).
At the same time, the focus on infancy has justif ied a turning away from a traditional view of an unconscious formed by repression, itself tied to the oedipal period—an unconscious revealed therapeutically through interpretation of its derivatives. Instead, infancy-influenced theorists see behavioral patterns (e.g., of attachment or other relatedness) imprinted procedurally as implicit memories that are revealed through enactments and altered (as they were generated) in present, here-and-now relational encounters.
The BCPSG paper provides us an example of the application of this line of thinking to the therapeutic discourse of an adult analysis; as such, it affords us an opportunity to interrogate the assumptions of this approach. Every reader will have his or her own line of inquiry, as the